Will Haswell provide a *huge* benefit to the 15" rMBP?

[MacLifer]

It can be argued well that waiting for Haswell to buy a 13" rMBP makes sense, if you have the patience to wait.

But what about the 15" rMBP? Will the 2nd generation 15" rMBP have a huge benefit from something like a Haswell?

In other words, for someone looking at the 15" rMBP now, will the 2nd gen only come out with basic, minor spec improvements that make waiting not make as much sense as waiting for the 2nd gen 13" rMBP?

 

[A Hebrew]

If Apple drops Samsung for LG, the 2nd gen rMBP won't be an improvement.


Haswell is all speculation at this point, ask again in 4-6 months.

 

[markus843]

If Apple drops Samsung for LG, the 2nd gen rMBP won't be an improvement.


Haswell is all speculation at this point, ask again in 4-6 months.

I agree with this ^

 

[nuckinfutz]

It can be argued well that waiting for Haswell to buy a 13" rMBP makes sense, if you have the patience to wait.

But what about the 15" rMBP? Will the 2nd generation 15" rMBP have a huge benefit from something like a Haswell?

In other words, for someone looking at the 15" rMBP now, will the 2nd gen only come out with basic, minor spec improvements that make waiting not make as much sense as waiting for the 2nd gen 13" rMBP?

Depends on in you're looking for a CPU boost or a GPU boost. Haswell has a beefed up GPU architecture that seems ideal for Retina class displays. Those looking for massive updates to CPU performance will likely be disappointed.

If I wanted a rMBP and couldn't wait until next summer I'd feel comfortable enough buying today's model. If I could wait ..there's be no problems with Haswell it's going to improve on what we have today anyways.

 

[MacLifer]

Depends on in you're looking for a CPU boost or a GPU boost. Haswell has a beefed up GPU architecture that seems ideal for Retina class displays. Those looking for massive updates to CPU performance will likely be disappointed.

If I wanted a rMBP and couldn't wait until next summer I'd feel comfortable enough buying today's model. If I could wait ..there's be no problems with Haswell it's going to improve on what we have today anyways.

I guess I am looking at the question from a future proofing perspective. I can see buyers of a 13" rMBP wondering about how future proof their machine is especially given the ivy bridge dedicated graphics card + lack of 16GB RAM option. And when Haswell comes out and it does what it claims to do, will the resale value of your 13" rMBP go down the toilet.

With the 15" rMBP, on the surface, it seems a bit more future proof. But I was just trying to verify that.

 

[shznit]

Haswell will bring extremely low idle power consumption and a much better integrated GPU, exactly what retina macbooks need. 128MB L4 should definitely help with these crazy resolutions.

I'm tempted to get the 15 now since it has the 650m to make up for the HD4000, and get a Haswell 13 next year. The only thing stopping me is not knowing how much the 15 will be worth then.

 

[GrandPhrase]

Haswell will bring extremely low idle power consumption and a much better integrated GPU, exactly what retina macbooks need. 128MB eDRAM should definitely help with these crazy resolutions.

I'm tempted to get the 15 now since it has the 650m to make up for the HD4000, and get a Haswell 13 next year. The only thing stopping me is now knowing how much the 15 will be worth then.

So do you believe there will be retina in the 2013 13" MBA revision (not at the base prices of course, premium like the 13" rMBP)?

 

[shznit]

So do you believe there will be retina in the 2013 13" MBA revision (not at the base prices of course, premium like the 13" rMBP)?

That is more of business decision, but my opinion is no retina for MBA til 2014 at least. The screens have to come down in price enough to fit in a $1200 laptop while maintaining the margins Apple is used to.

 

[theuserjohnny]

Depends on in you're looking for a CPU boost or a GPU boost. Haswell has a beefed up GPU architecture that seems ideal for Retina class displays. Those looking for massive updates to CPU performance will likely be disappointed.

If I wanted a rMBP and couldn't wait until next summer I'd feel comfortable enough buying today's model. If I could wait ..there's be no problems with Haswell it's going to improve on what we have today anyways.

Came to post something similar to this.

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So do you believe there will be retina in the 2013 13" MBA revision (not at the base prices of course, premium like the 13" rMBP)?

I say they could do it now if they wanted but the battery life would be horrible. So until they can improve the battery life I wouldn't expect one for at least another year.

 

[DVD9]

Depends on in you're looking for a CPU boost or a GPU boost. Haswell has a beefed up GPU architecture that seems ideal for Retina class displays. Those looking for massive updates to CPU performance will likely be disappointed.

If I wanted a rMBP and couldn't wait until next summer I'd feel comfortable enough buying today's model. If I could wait ..there's be no problems with Haswell it's going to improve on what we have today anyways.

According to AnandTech Haswell is shaping up to be a bust. "Five to fifteen percent overall improvement".

The big onboard GPU improvement just happened with Ivy Bridge. If it were possible for Intel to continue with annual improvements of that magnitude than nVidia would quickly go out of business.

 

[GrandPhrase]

That is more of business decision, but my opinion is no retina for MBA til 2014 at least. The screens have to come down in price enough to fit in a $1200 laptop while maintaining the margins Apple is used to.

Of course not the $1200 MBA - I mentioned "premium" like the 13" rMBP in my post though..

The cMBP is 1200 while the rMBP is 1700 so maybe the Air could follow a similar footprint..?

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Came to post something similar to this.

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I say they could do it now if they wanted but the battery life would be horrible. So until they can improve the battery life I wouldn't expect one for at least another year.

Has andantech said anything about Haswell battery life? Intel claims double battery life (over hyped) but maybe it will at least bring the battery life to remain or even drop only an hour..

 

[nuckinfutz]

According to AnandTech Haswell is shaping up to be a bust. "Five to fifteen percent overall improvement".

The big onboard GPU improvement just happened with Ivy Bridge. If it were possible for Intel to continue with annual improvements of that magnitude than nVidia would quickly go out of business.

Haswell is a new architecture. It will have significant changes in the GPU.

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/04/02/haswells-gpu-prowess-is-due-to-crystalwell/

though Anand does mention that Broadwell is likely to be a bigger update

http://www.anandtech.com/print/6355

 

[Saladinos]

Haswell will bring extremely low idle power consumption and a much better integrated GPU, exactly what retina macbooks need.

That's been the case for the last few cycles. Intel have CPU performance down; they've been miles ahead of the competition since Conroe. The two areas where they're weak have been power consumption and integrated GPU performance since the Pentium 4.

Just like Apples trademark is thinner and lighter, GPU performance and power consumption have been staple Intel upgrades every architecture cycle.

That is to say there won't be anything too radical.

 

[DVD9]

Haswell is a new architecture. It will have significant changes in the GPU.

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/04/02/haswells-gpu-prowess-is-due-to-crystalwell/

though Anand does mention that Broadwell is likely to be a bigger update

http://www.anandtech.com/print/6355

Has the stock price of nVidia dropped so low that it's been delisted?

If Haswell improves over Ivy the same as Ivy did over Sandy Bridge then it's over for nVidia. Wall Street analysts follow such things closely.

 

[shznit]

That's been the case for the last few cycles. Intel have CPU performance down; they've been miles ahead of the competition since Conroe. The two areas where they're weak have been power consumption and integrated GPU performance since the Pentium 4.

Just like Apples trademark is thinner and lighter, GPU performance and power consumption have been staple Intel upgrades every architecture cycle.

That is to say there won't be anything too radical.

I guess "radical" is a matter of opinion, but to me the power management improvements are dramatic. Integrated voltage regulators, new sleep states (the cpu is basically off while idling), decoupled ring bus, panel self refresh, integrated south bridge, the list goes on.

On the performance side you have twice the cache bandwidth, 256bit AVX2 (including scatter/gather), extra execution ports, transactional memory, L4 cache, 2x GPU, and better perf/watt. Most current CPU benchmarks may not show large gains but efficiency is going up a big way. I can't wait for vSphere to take full advantage, the server versions should arrive just in time for my next large datacenter upgrade.

We have gotten to the point where all the low hanging fruit has been picked and extra performance gains are really hard to achieve without increasing power consumption, especially on the same process node and they have ARM creeping up from the bottom. Platform perf/watt is the name of the game now.

 

[Mr MM]

Has the stock price of nVidia dropped so low that it's been delisted?

If Haswell improves over Ivy the same as Ivy did over Sandy Bridge then it's over for nVidia. Wall Street analysts follow such things closely.

so nvidia is just going to hang the towel? get a grip, it doesnt matter that intel is going to make a good dgpu, nvidia has other markets not to mention better products in the sense of more powerful gpus

 

[MacLifer]

Bottom line...

Buying a 15" rMBP 2.3GHz i7 w/ 16 GB RAM is fairly future proofed against an upcoming Haswell line of 15" rMBP .. is that the bottom line?

 

[theuserjohnny]

Of course not the $1200 MBA - I mentioned "premium" like the 13" rMBP in my post though..

The cMBP is 1200 while the rMBP is 1700 so maybe the Air could follow a similar footprint..?

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Has andantech said anything about Haswell battery life? Intel claims double battery life (over hyped) but maybe it will at least bring the battery life to remain or even drop only an hour..

The chip will contribute to the helping of the life but Apple itself needs to create newer batteries.

 

[magbarn]

If 2013 rMBP gets Haswell GT3 igpu then 100% speed improvement is possible with igpu. The cpu side possible 10% battery life and 10-15% better overall cpu. Most of the batteyr saving tech sounds like it won't really apply to our power hungry retina displays. The dGPU isn't going to improve that much as at the time of Haswell's release, Nvidia/AMD will still be using 28nm dgpu's and usually a process shrink is required for a big improvement. The rmbp 13 is being dinged here as it lacks a discrete gpu so haswell's purported 2x faster igpu is going to be much more noticeable as there's no dgpu to fall back on.

 

[Snowshiro]

Will the 2nd generation 15" rMBP have a huge benefit from something like a Haswell?

In a word "no". You don't even need to see the tech to know this. It simply isn't in Intel's interest to release a generation of CPUs with a massive leap in performance. They make their money from incremental performance boosts, so that older gear slowly fades into planned obsolescence over time. Furthermore, they would be unable to sustain the same level of continuous improvement, making the subsequent couple of generations seem lackluster and disappointing by comparison.

If you *do* take into account what Intel have said, it appears that Haswell's primarily performance improvement is going to be in power consumption. That's where a lot of their attention has been focused as they want to make damn sure that Windows RT doesn't offer a more viable alternative to Intel powered Windows 8 tablets, given Microsoft's huge push to get into the mobile device market.

I'd predict a 10-15% performance improvement, with perhaps a 15-20% battery life gain.

 

[onthecouchagain]

How does Anandtech know what future Intel chips will be or do? I'm curious about this.

 

[dusk007]

Unlike Apple Intel lays out their plan in quite some detail at the Intel Developer Forum. It is not a secret what Haswell will bring to the table. The only thing that only benchmarks will tell is how much of an impact each change will actually deliver. Anand has a lot of knowledge and experience to say what something will probably deliver.

The bottom line is that Haswell will be a great improvement for the Ultrabook class Notebooks. The single SoC design will potentially offer great battery life and space savings.
For everything bigger like Quad Core Haswell will be about the same with maybe a few percent IPC improvements and a bit more clock rate. On the CPU compute side there is nothing that will really do anything significant. They go a bit wider again but that will only help some workloads and have almost no effect on others. New AVX instructions, more video coding features and the faster GPU is the new stuff.

I also doubt that Intel will put the fastest GPU with dedicated Memory in just any CPU. So many Haswell won't even be faster. On designs where a dedicated GPU fits I guess they will stick with the slower GPU and only where no dGPU can fit in they will add the best GPU config.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6277/haswell-up-to-128mb-onpackage-cache-ulv-gpu-performance-estimates
It is unlikely that just any notebook like a 15" rMBP will even get the best possible iGPU. Chances are they get a GT2 or maybe a GT3 but without the on package cache.

 

[Mac32]

Haswell will bring extremely low idle power consumption and a much better integrated GPU, exactly what retina macbooks need. 128MB L4 should definitely help with these crazy resolutions.

I'm tempted to get the 15 now since it has the 650m to make up for the HD4000, and get a Haswell 13 next year. The only thing stopping me is not knowing how much the 15 will be worth then.

Well, and in 2014 the next Nvidia Geforce architecture (Maxwell) will offer a HUGE increase in graphics power, which will make the rMBP 15' a much better gaming machine. It goes on and on..
Personally, I'm waiting for Haswell next year.

 

[dusk007]

Well, and in 2014 the next Nvidia Geforce architecture (Maxwell) will offer a HUGE increase in graphics power, which will make the rMBP 15' a much better gaming machine. It goes on and on..
Personally, I'm waiting for Haswell next year.

Doubtful. Nvidia made huge strides with the Kepler architecture in power efficiency. Since there is no process shrink coming and it will still be a 28nm GPU there is little chances that Nvidia can significantly increase performance while staying in the same power envelope.

AMD faces currently the same problem with their newest desktop architecture. While staying in the same TDP class there just isn't a whole lot of room for improvement without a process shrink.

A huge increase seems very unlikely.

 

[Jinzen]

Well, and in 2014 the next Nvidia Geforce architecture (Maxwell) will offer a HUGE increase in graphics power, which will make the rMBP 15' a much better gaming machine. It goes on and on..
Personally, I'm waiting for Haswell next year.

But it's about refinement, which the current models don't have.

IR
Graphics performance
Battery life

Next year we'll see smoother UI, battery life improvements, and integrated graphics for certain. Maybe even panels without IR.

That's worth waiting for if you don't need a laptop now.